I'm
slowly recovering all the lost data (a really malicious virus, long
story). By recovering I mean rewriting everything, as the digital
copies are forever gone. Sorry it takes so long! I should catch up
with everything by Wednesday. Here is the post summarizing our
November Donostia Book Club meeting.
We
were lucky enough to talk to a Frisian author, Bart Kingma, who is
currently in San Sebastian participating in a great partnership
programme, Other Words, between cultural organisations in European
regions which aims to establish a network of creative placements for
European writers in small and minority languages.
Bart
is definitely a man of the Renaissance.
Here you have his biography (taken from:
http://www.otherwordsliterature.eu/eng/writers/):
Bart Kingma (Wommels, 1970) trained as writing journalist at the school for journalism in Zwolle. He began his career as a newspaper journalist for Boom publishers in Meppel, writing for several magazines in the Dutch provinces Drenthe, Overijssel, Flevoland and Gelderland. Over time, he made the move to the journalism for television. From there he gradually shifted his focus from journalism to directing and writing scripts. At first for commercial parties, since the year 2000 as a program maker for the school television part of Omrop Fryslân Television (Broadcasting Friesland).
For the broadcaster, he made educational programs for children from 4 until 18 years, such as It Lân fan Efke (The Land of Efke) for preschoolers, Studio F and Tsjek for children of primary schools, the history series 11&30, and he worked as scriptwriter and sometimes directed drama series for the secondary school, such as I.K., De Utflecht and De Koers. He also made several documentaries for FryslânDok and he directed television series as Muse and Tafel18.
In 2008, he took the initiative to write most translations for De Partizanen, a Frisian tribute to Leonard Cohen, performed by several musicians. This CD / DVD was followed by a musical theater Prachtige Ferliezers (Beautiful losers) in 2009, which Bart wrote.
In 2010 he published his first novel Griene Simmer (Green Summer) (publisher Elikser), about a man who gets mixed up in feelings of guilt about what he left to do on crucial moments in his life.
In 2013, he wrote and directed the musical theater Swart Langstme (Black Desire), which tells the true story of the murder by the French singer Bertrand Cantat on the actress Mary Trintignant. The performance was conducted by Mariusz & de Muzikanten.
In 2015, he published the book De deikoersen fan Remco (The daily courses of Remco), in a story that runs parallel to the drama series De Koers (The Course). In the same year he directed the show Op alle Fronten (On all fronts) of Inez Timmer, which tells the story of Lale Andersen, the singer of the famous warhit 'Lili Marleen'.
Next to that, Bart regularly writes columns for cultural newsmagazine De Moanne (The Month) and for the radio program Bureau De Vries he writes and manages his satirical website De Bûten Post (The outpost). For many year he organized a festival on storytelling: the MidSimmerJûn Festival in the village Rie. He also occasionally writes lyrics for bands and artists as Vangrail, Gurbe Douwstra en Gerbrich van Dekken.
On the same web, you can find an extract from one of his works translated to English. I'm sure those of you, who have participated in the meeting will be curious to read it!
Bart is currently working
on a new project here, in The Basque Country. The novel he is writing
is about Sera,
a Dutch singer-songwriter, singing in the Frisian language as well as
in English, Dutch and French. She usually performs solo or in a small
setting and she spends some time in The Basque Country trying to
overcome trauma from her past. All that, while exploring a new
country, new culture and getting to know new people. To see what Sera
is actually doing, you can follow her on Facebook and that should
give you a hint about Bart's creativity and imagination:
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